There and back again? Media freedom and autonomy in Central and Eastern Europe

Collusion between the press and politicians
is not confined to western Europe. Central and Eastern European countries are
also plagued by their own mini-Murdochs – and in these more fragile democracies,
they represent an even bigger threat.

Putting the Gazeta Wyborcza together in Warsaw, Poland. Flickr/Marius Kucharczyk. Some rights reserved.

In
August 2012, Bulgarian investigative news site Bivol.bg
published a story about alleged pressure exerted by the Prime
Minister, Boyko Borisov, on the owners of two high-circulation daily newspapers,
Trud and 24 Chasa, to sell their shares to the competing publisher, the New
Bulgarian Media Group. According to the article’s sources, the Prime Minister
personally threatened one of the two owners, Lyubomir Pavlov, that should he
not agree to the deal, he would end up in prison, as he was facing fresh
charges for tax evasion and money laundering.

In
any country with a free and pluralistic news media scene, information regarding
the Prime Minister lobbying for private business interests, making threats and
compromising the independence of both the judiciary and the press at the same
time, would most likely evolve into a media scandal, particularly in the context
of the US diplomatic cable from 2006 revealed by WikiLeaks a year ago,
describing Borisov’s media strategy as a combination of “payments for positive
coverage” and “threats to those who report negatively on him”.

In
Bulgaria, however, both media freedom and pluralism appear to be in jeopardy
these days, and the space for independent journalistic investigation is
shrinking fast. While physical violence against journalists still continues to
be a real threat, a silencing of critical journalism is more commonly achieved through
ownership and economic pressures.

The Murdoch of the East?

These
practices have recently been made even easier due to the financial problems faced
by most media organizations, as well as in consequence of the process of
gradual concentration of a large part of Bulgarian news media in the hands of one
company – the New Bulgarian Media Group. Having emerged only in 2007, this
company with a murky ownership structure and sources of financing has quickly
grown into Bulgaria’s most important media player, owning a number of national
newspapers and cable television channels, as well as the majority of newspapers
distribution network.

Formally
headed by the controversial duo of Irena Krasteva, the former head of the
Bulgarian State Lottery - lacking any previous media experience – and her son
Delyan Peevski, who is an MP for the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, this
media conglomerate has built a reputation for unscrupulously serving the
government of the day: a fierce enemy of Borisov’s party GERB before the 2009
elections, it became its biggest ally following the announcement of the
election results, and has remained loyal to Borisov ever since.

Pointing
to the company’s aggressive price strategy – less politely labelled as dumping –
and continuing horizontal expansion apparently backed by the government, many
observers and journalists fear for the fate of the few remaining newspapers
still outside Krasteva’s empire, and raise concerns about a monopolization of the
Bulgarian newspaper market, with serious consequences for journalistic
independence.

Bulgaria
is, however, far from being the only country in Central and Eastern Europe where
media independence and autonomy are currently at stake, and where journalists
are under twofold pressures from politicians and media owners, who are often interlocked
in an informal power alliance, or even personified by one and the same figure. In
fact, the last several years have witnessed a notable increase in the number of
local business tycoons in many countries in Central and Eastern Europe who have
acquired news media outlets, while being, at the same time, involved in local
politics – whether directly (as active politicians) or indirectly, through
sponsorship or other type of party support.

A regional trend

This
has been occurring very much simultaneously with the departure of many western
media companies from Central and Eastern Europe, a process mainly (although not
solely) caused by the impact of the global economic crisis on the media markets
across the region from 2008 onwards. Seeing the advertising expenditures
dwindling and their revenues plummeting, publishers like Bonnier, WAZ, Ringier,
Mecom or Northcliffe decided to sell either some or all their assets in the CEE
newspaper markets, thereby opening opportunities predominantly for local
business elites who – with just a few exceptions – do not perceive the
investment into news media as a means for making profit (and much less as a
pillar of democracy) but rather as an instrument to serve their business or
political interests.

Belonging
often to the richest people in their respective countries, these business
people certainly do not mind operating their media at a loss, at least
temporarily, because their main sources of profit lie in other sectors – be it
banking, energy business, coal mining, oil production or real estate. Although
this might save some newspapers from extinction in times of crisis, there is
usually a price to pay by the media for losing their structural autonomy,
especially in cases when the owners have an interest in pursuing particular
political agenda through their outlets.

Apart
from Bulgaria, the crudest examples of political instrumentalization by media
magnates arguably come from Romania or Latvia, where oligarchs like Dan
Voiculescu (Chairman of the Conservative Party) or Aivars Lembergs (Mayor of
the city of Ventspils) have become notorious for using media under their control to
attack political opponents and divert attention from their own scandals.

Elsewhere,
news media owned by politically connected businessmen have been suspected of
serving as platform for political propaganda; illustrative examples might
include dailies such as Magyar Hírlap,
turned from formerly liberal into a right-wing newspaper by its owner, the
Hungarian billionaire Gábor
Széles, or Diena, an erstwhile symbol of quality journalism in Latvia under
the previous owner, the Swedish company Bonnier, which sold it in 2008 to local
real estate developer Viestrus Koziols; this move has quickly sparked an exodus
of journalists fearing for their independence, who have later founded their own
investigative journal Ir. (Incidentally,
there was a similar story in the Czech Republic a couple years ago, when a small
group of journalists left the weekly Euro
in protest against politically-motivated editorial interventions by the owner,
the richest Czech businessman Petr Kellner, and started an independent online
daily CzechPosition.cz).

But even those outlets belonging to proprietors
with a reputedly “softer touch” to editorial policies, such as the coal
baron Zdenek Bakala, the owner of a couple of Czech and Slovak elite
newspapers, are reported to struggle with self-censorship when it comes to
covering issues close to their owner’s perceived interests, and face the
challenge of fighting twice as hard for the public trust, simply because of being
permanently under suspicion that their coverage (or lack of it) is fuelled by
particularistic motives.

Even
if the above-outlined changes in media ownership and the following rise of
owners-oligarchs do not characterize the entire news media scene in most CEE countries,
and the approach of this kind of proprietors to editorial independence often
displays notable differences, it is nevertheless still possible to draw a
parallel between the process of changing media ownership structures and the
recent development of media freedom in this region, as measured annually by Freedom House. For anybody expecting gradual progress in arguably one of the
key indicators of successful democratic transition over the course of years, it
might come as a rather daunting revelation that the majority of Central and
Eastern European countries which have since 2004 entered the European Union
nowadays display significantly worse scores on the Freedom of the Press Index
than they did at the time of accession.

While
the almost spectacular downgrading of Hungary’s media freedom score (by almost
50 percent in just three years), reflecting the much-criticised media laws
adopted by Viktor Orbán’s
right-wing government, has been given a lot of publicity on both national and
the EU level, there has not been so much attention paid to other countries
where media freedom has been on a steady decline for some time already.

This
concerns most notably Latvia, one of the best performing new EU countries
around 2004 in terms of media freedom scores, which has seen a drop by almost
40 percent since then, and is now moving uncomfortably close to the category of
countries where media are classified as 'partly free' only. A few other former
frontrunners of the region – Poland, Lithuania and Slovenia – have also fallen back notably, having seen their scores dropping by 20 to 25 percent since
2004. Romania, even though showing minor improvement over the past several
years, still remains farther from achieving the 'free' status it had right
at the beginning of the new century, while Bulgaria – needless to add – has
most recently equalled its lowest ranking in over a decade, and continues to be
labelled as 'partly free' as well.

Is regression avoidable?

Looking
at the region as a whole, these tendencies paint a fairly bleak picture of the
systemic conditions in which a significant part of Central and Eastern European
news media operate today. After a period of gradual improvement, peaking around
the time right before the EU accession, media freedom started declining again, with
the 2011 average score matching the value from 1998. This clearly represents a setback
for the hopes that EU membership would safeguard the protection and further
extension of this important component of democracy, and points to the limits of
the EU conditionality when it comes to maintaining achieved standards in the
post-accession period.

In
addition, the recent economic crisis has exposed the vulnerability of media
markets in this region more than in any other part of Europe, often resulting
in ownership changes and subsequent reduction in the structural autonomy of news
media organizations, many of which became directly intertwined with business
and political actors. Of course, there is still independent, quality journalism
to be found in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly in more mature and
affluent markets like Estonia, the Czech Republic or Poland, enabling the media
to better withstand political or business pressures; this is also the case in
some public service media, despite the budget cuts and dwindling audience
ratings.

Elsewhere,
however, accountable journalism is increasingly finding shelter on the
internet, with personal journalists’ blogs and investigative news sites (of which
the above mentioned Bivol.bgis an
example ) mushrooming in many countries. While offering space for critical
expression and even anonymity, wherever necessary, these alternative platforms only
rarely generate adequate revenues to ensure their sustainability, so despite
their clear democratic potential, they still cannot be considered a full match
for their mainstream counterparts.

Without
resorting to any sort of gloomy predictions, it seems reasonable to acknowledge
that the road towards free and independent press systems in this region, first
entered upon in 1989, is indeed a long and windy one, and Central and Eastern European
media might have just taken the wrong turn; hopefully not too late to find the
right direction again.

About the author

Dr Václav Štětka is a research fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford specialising in media and globalisation.

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